“Well, don’t dawdle. Our thirst grows restless.’
“Madame Sarah, your indulgence, please!”
“Now you may tell us!”
“All right, I will. Sit close and listen. Imagine a place that somehow didn’t change over a long, long time. Not much of that left in our little isle today. And what’s more, it’s not only still there, but it’s still working. Now, grown older — I have, that is — and finally unafraid, I just went in.”
“I’ve got it. A house of fallen virtue. Ha!”
“No, but this place is the more strange for still being in working order. Imagine an old mill at Sarehole. Tall stone wheelhouse so ancient that no one alive remembers who built it. It sits beside a stream. Inside, a grind and creak that is like a voice worn with time. The labor of water, wood, and stone continues. Full-span belts of oxhide, sutured and sized as if to hold up the pants of giants, whirr and slap. Mighty shafts that once were tree-sentinels in some Mirkwood now lost to us — these turn and shudder with power. Miller’s dust everywhere. Water glides from pond to pond. Quiet and calm. Green and deep and dark. Each gathering its fill of unreleased energy. Suddenly the water pours into the race. It tumbles down the sluice with irresistible momentum. Wooden gear teeth mesh into morticed slots in the rolling cogwheel the size of this room. It turns and the grindstone rolls. All this is overseen by a miller named Roos with a long black beard.”
“And you finally made his acquaintance?”
“Well, it was his father that I saw as a boy. But the name and the measure of the man remain the same. I listened, and delved, as best I could, into the names and lineage of his family and the place.”
“Ever the philologist you are, Tollers.”
“Give me a name and I can find a story. Give me a language and I can find its bones.”
“Give you ale and your pipe and you can talk all evening.”
“Aye, from my view, Tollers, in the case of our English, the bones are a bit jumbled, wouldn’t you say?”
“Much has been lost. Yet much may still be seen, if dimly.”
“And your invented language? This dwarvish tongue? “
“Elvish. Not invented so much as, well, found.”
“Since we’re picking on our good Professor Tolkien tonight, let me ask him a personal question. For all these … myths you explore and populate, you yourself never seem to change. Jack here goes grayer by the month.”
“Or the week.”
“Or the pint.”
“Don’t be foolish, Ian. I can change. Why Jack has even brought me around to a Christian point of view. No mean feat that. But here’s the lesson, and listen close …”
“Never underestimate a man’s ability to transform himself, especially when he travels the borderlands between myth and reality.”
“Tollers, as much as I admire your intellect and your pursuit of this hobby, there are those at the college, the newer of them I admit, that ask if you should not be working toward publishing something more, well, scholarly?”
“And you, Jack, of all people, should listen to them?”
“So, you continue to dream of inventing this mythology for England?”
“For my own small part, yes.”
“You said at our last gathering that you aspire to replicate the Finns. They had a thousand-year head start on you. Lonnrot only compiled the Kalevala, he didn’t write it. And the Finns didn’t mix in with the Romans and the Normans along the way.”
“Nonetheless, now that we are all well bound by our ale-oaths, I tell you I find myself unable to stop. I’m not even sure if it’s made up any more. It seems to be a tale less invented than discovered. The thing is rather unstoppable in its own way.”
“And at last that is to be published?”
“That, Owen, remains to be seen. I have a fine, growing collection of rejection letters to vouch for my diligence and some critical advice from these no-longer prospective publishers.”
“Such as?”
“‘Too extravagant.’ ‘Hard to follow.’ ‘Silliness. Let it go.’ And my absolute favorite, ‘Hobbits … really?’ I could go on till our next round of ale.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“If a tale inspires, someone will seek to destroy it. It’s the way of the world. What are a few snide publisher comments, anyway? Great epics of heroism and adventure have been rubbed out routinely. The victors write the history.”
“It’s not my tale anyway. It is a lost tale, partially rediscovered at best. I’m happy to unearth it as I go. Besides, my children enjoy all its bits and pieces. It may fall to others to finish it because it goes on and on, backwards and forwards. But enough of my ramblings …”
“Jack, tell us of your holiday.”
“I will, just as soon as we are relieved of all this miller’s dust and language-bones of our forefathers. Sarah, bring a round full-drawn of fresh pints, if you please.”
Chapter 4
OCTOBER 16
An hour after the meeting with Mel, Cadence drove home with the Belvedere’s breakfast special, “Halibut Sous de Mar” drying on her blouse and flopping in her stomach.
Under the spell of Mel’s eye she had told him almost everything she knew about her grandfather, which, all in all, wasn’t a lot.
For instance, she told him about sitting in the still, muggy, old-peach-crate smell of the hidden attic on that hot, never ending afternoon of Indian Summer. She told him about opening one journal after another. How she would note a place, a famous name, or a strange word. She told him how, looking at the brittle yellowed pages of his personal journals, she realized her last flesh-and-blood relative had traveled a very, very long way.
For reasons obscure even to herself, she didn’t tell Mel one fact: that her grandfather’s story involved a secret riddle.
Cadence had noticed it as Everett wrapped up the paperwork of declaring her the administrator of the estate. There was a poem in her grandfather’s handwriting, scrawled across the outside of the same envelope that contained his rudimentary will and named her executor:
